Staff representatives from several entities of the Auchan group were summoned, Tuesday at 9 a.m., to CSEs in the Lille region, for an “update on the situation of the company and its projects”. For their part, the unions fear bad news on the employment front. According to a source close to the matter, confirming information from The Letteraround 2,300 jobs are threatened in France.
According to the source close to the matter, around 2,300 jobs could therefore be threatened at different levels of the company, which employs around 54,000 employees in France. Some of the jobs would be threatened at the level of support functions within the various headquarters, another part at the store level. According to The Letter, this would be a vast voluntary departure plan.
Auchan far behind the competition
Auchan Retail had already announced, in September 2020, the elimination of 1,475 positions in France, after a voluntary departure plan of more than 500 positions in January of the same year.
The pioneer of the hypermarket format continues difficult economic exercises. Its holding company Elo announced, in July, a net loss of nearly a billion euros over the first six months of 2024. In 2023, Elo had published a net loss of 379 million euros and sales down by 1.7%, to 32.9 billion euros, while inflation had boosted the sales of most of its competitors.
In France, Auchan is the fifth distributor with just over 9% of the market, far from the leading quartet composed of E.Leclerc (24.1%), Carrefour (21.4%) and Mousquetaires/Intermarché (17. 4%) and Cooperative U (12.2%), according to the Kantar institute.
Auchan recently joined forces with its competitors Intermarché and Casino to pool purchases of foodstuffs then sold on the shelves of their stores, for an unusually long period of ten years.
This pooling has aroused the concern of trade union organizations, as has the announced objective of reducing the commercial surface area of around a third of Auchan hypermarkets “in all its European countries”, i.e. ultimately an “average reduction of 25% of sales areas”.
